Hot vegan (dumplings) OR How To Make Vegan Dim Sum and Amaze Your Wife

While I was off protesting on Sunday, my incredibly handsome husband did something totally out of character (to be honest, anything but working on philosophy papers and drinking coffee is out of character) - he attended a vegan dim sum cooking class. So when I finally stumbled home from the mainland on Monday afternoon, he offered to show off his new skills and make me dinner. I was understandably reluctant, with the Great Black Bean Fire of 2008 still fresh in my mind, but he was so excited it would've been cruel to deny him. So he popped into the kitchen while I hid in the office, surreptitiously wolfing crackers so I wouldn't starve.

BUT, to my surprise, the meal was excellent. The star of the meal was his vegetable dumplings. Here's a how-to guide.

Assemble the ingredients for the filling. Kelly used bok choy, mushrooms, and spring onions*:

Boil the bok choy for a few minutes until cooked through. While you're doing this, sauté the mushrooms in a dry pan until they release their moisture.

Once the bok choy is cooked, chop it finely and put it in cheesecloth (he actually used a laundry bag - the kind you buy for washing delicates) and squeeze the hell out of it to get it as dry as possible.

Your dry bok choy will look something like this:

Assemble all of your ingredients, then begin filling your dumplings (the dumpling wrappers are fairly simple to make, but they're also really cheap so it's just easier to buy them).

Kelly set up an assembly line on the living room floor so he could make dumplings while he watched "True Blood." I wished I'd swept the floor this week. Or month. Or since we moved in. Whatever.

Once the dumplings are assembled, pop them in the rice cooker to steam for a few minutes.

And then you're done!

He served them with a dipping sauce comprised of soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, and a drop of sesame oil, and a scallion pancake that involved so much kneading, rolling, and clouds of flour floating around the apartment that I can't bring myself to write about it.

Enjoy!

* Next time, I think I'd throw in some ginger to give it a little bite.